Autobiographia Literaria

This prompt is based on one shared with me by novelist (and 24-Hour Room denizen) Dave King, who adapted it from a prompt once given him by the poet Billy Collins. It takes as a model the Frank O'Hara poem "Autobiographia Literaria," which in turn was written partly in response to the Biographia Literaria of Samuel Coleridge.

While Coleridge discusses his life, aesthetic theories (including the introduction of the phrase "suspension of disbelief") and influences over the course of 24 chapters, 2 volumes and 605 pages, O'Hara offers a 16-line bullion cube that renders his life as a single turn, from cowed defensive loner to creator of literary splendor.

O'Hara takes twelve lines (or three quarters of the poem) to lay out the first phase and just four to conclude by exclaiming his ecstatic existence at the center of all beauty.

Dave's prompt is a little more of a formal pastiche than mine, asking the writer to follow O'Hara's style and structure closely. (I include it verbatim, with his permission, as a link below.)

My version is a little looser. It doesn't necessarily have to come out as poetry.

The first step is to read the poem.

Autobiographia Literaria

By Frank O'Hara

When I was a child

I played by myself in a

corner of the schoolyard

all alone.

I hated dolls and I

hated games, animals were

not friendly and birds

flew away.

If anyone was looking

for me I hid behind a

tree and cried out "I am

an orphan."

And here I am, the

center of all beauty!

writing these poems!

Imagine!

Now go back and read it again, perhaps several times, thinking about its shape. Take note of the fact that the first three stanzas are single sentences made up of simple words. The fourth stanza contains two sentences, with the final one just a single word, "Imagine!" — which also happens to be the only three-syllable word in the poem. You might observe that the opening echoes the language from I Corinthians: "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things." Is there a canonical text you might want to lean on to open or anchor your own own compressed autobiography?

Finally, write your life story (or that of a fictional character, if you prefer) in exactly 5 sentences. You won't be able to include much, so choose carefully what you do include.

• Begin with your childhood. Spend the first three sentences there, or in the past at any rate.

• Turn to the present in your fourth and fifth sentences, and see if you can end with an exclamation, akin to O'Hara's "Imagine!"2

• If the constraints aren't useful, adjust them to your needs.

This prompt might generate a text you like just for itself, maybe a flash fiction, a microflashback that fits into a longer work, or a poem. Or maybe the text you write will be a seed which you can develop and enlarge to whatever size you want. Regardless, because of the constraints of the initial exercise, it will have a singular focus and compression.